In the first article, I wrote about how I arrived at the idea of creating an art collection like Propaganda.
In this article, I will shared more about how I found inspiration for the compositions, colors, and use of text, and some of the decision I made along the way to translate those into a generative art collection.
Getting Inspirations From Real Posters
I went out and searched for as many posters as I could. I honestly don’t know how many I reviewed, probably over 400+ posters, from various countries.
I was taking notes about the composition, choice of colors, use of text, placement of human bodies and faces, and so son.
From there, I was able to come up with enough inspiration to create a larger set of compositions for the collection I’m working on, which would be consistent with the propaganda style that I was aiming for.
Below are some examples of the posters on which I stumbled during my research.
Color Work
Poster printing from the 1940’s until the 1960’s had to be done in a mass printing approach, which means it had to be done with cheap paper and only a few colors so it could done quickly, inexpensively, and at scale.
This is why posters from that time generally have at most two to four colors, often include a stroke or halo around different elements, and use basic colors such as black, blue, and red, which were the cheapest mass-produced inks.
I am aiming for a collection that resembles the look and feel of posters from that era, therefore my work on colors for this collection will have to include an understanding of how such posters used to be printed.
Below are some examples of the few palettes on which I landed at that stage. They were not all great, but all had to be tried, and everything is still a work in progress anyway.
And below is an example of a color palette which I tried to derive directly from one of the retro posters I found during my research. On the left is the retro poster, and on the right is the one I created.
Working With Text
Text is a huge part of propaganda posters, because the slogans are a central part of the composition. My experimentation with colors, as you can see above, was using a single composition so I could see the variations of colors. This composition very quickly felt limited, because the text was disconnected from the rest of the composition, which gave a feel of “polaroid photo” to the outputs. Instead, the text has to be integrated into each design.
So I started digging further, and found this beautiful WWI poster, from which I started thinking of ways to bend text with code.
This opened up the door for more complex compositions that I would integrate text into the design.
For example, I tried reproducing a composition from a newspaper advertisement from the 1890s for a local Massachusetts shop, see below.
What is coming next?
I aim at posting something every month or so. In the next article, I will share more about my creative process and how the scope of the project totally exploded, and what I did to get it back on track.
If you want to be notified when the Propaganda collection will be released, the best is to follow me on Medium or Twitter, links below. Thanks!
